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initiation.
Jan. 25th, 2005 09:10 amEach and every ship has its own personality, its own particular and peculiar culture. In Sociology class, we would have broken it down even further, into ‘subculture’. Because there are societal norms out here on the water, unwritten protocols and dictates of etiquette that transcend any given ship, any given type of work that the ship performs, the country of origin of any given ship. And so on.
But each and every ship, its crew, has a very specific culture and personality that goes far beyond the parts of the sum of that given ship. I am quite sure that the way things work, the way we all interact, on the ship I am currently on, are the same workings and interactions that went on here when this ship was first commissioned. Which is not to say that everything is predestined and preordained aboard. Our personalities do have an effect, much like the moon on the tides; there is waxing and waning, but the ocean is always there.
And out here on the water, whenever there is a new crew member, a “FNG” (fucking new guy) it is absolutely necessary for him to undergo a hazing period in order to become a true member of the crew, a true and trusted shipmate. This hazing process is a function of the communal personality, a self-defensive mechanism in order to preserve itself intact. The hazing not only acclimates any given crew member to the new paradigm he is expected to live up to, but makes sure that any incompatible personalities aren’t allowed to infiltrate and corrupt the larger whole. For good or ill.
The form of the hazing isn’t your frat boy drink a gallon of beer through a funnel and circle jerk on a cupcake, it’s much more subtle. Subtle, but more insidious, I suppose. Insidious by nature because there is no set of tasks that a guy has to get through in order to gain acceptance. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no finish line in sight. Out here we keep it going for as long as necessary. Out here it keeps going until the FNG either proves he’s worth his salt in one way or another, or he simply gives up and jumps ship. And then there is the Mexican stand-off situations where a guy hates the crew, and the crew hates him, and neither will bend. We have that going on with our cook right now. But the thing is that even if I was to leave, even if the entire crew rotated off of this ship over the course of the next year, and he was to stay, the crew would always win. Because of that thing where the parts have little to do with the sum. The crew would eventually win, because some day he IS going to leave this ship, and up until that very day he is going to be harassed in all the little harrowing and nettling ways that we have to get away with it. In the old days, as recently as the eighties, we would simply leave him on the pier somewhere. With or without his bags. Before that? He might simply get tossed overboard in the middle of the night when nobody saw nothing.
And the hazing isn’t as concrete as the word has come to connote. It’s subtle and insidious. Nobody will talk to you. You have to perform the most demeaning and demoralizing duties. And no matter how well you carry those duties out, your supervisor will find fault and upbraid you. You constantly feel as if your job is in jeopardy, and, in my case at least, just before the Crew wins, just before I cast my hands skyward and resolve to get the fuck off that ship, something shifts. There is an imperceptible shift in attitude. From both the individual, and the crew. The level of exasperation that brings a man to the brink, is the very level of psychic stress that finally breaks an ego down. The point where you get so fucking angry where you don’t even care about your job, about your bills, about whomever is depending on you at home, is the pivot point where your very personality (ship-side at least) warps into a shape that fits the Crew, and at the same time, if you aren’t one of those that will never become a member of the crew and get runned-off the ship, it’s the same point where the Crew recognizes that you have eaten all the shit that they, that IT, has shoveled on your plate. You’ve eaten all the shit and come back for a second steaming heap of a helping with a grin on your face (because you just KNOW you are leaving…) and suddenly, instead of shit, you’ve got a cheeseburger on your plate. Sure, the freaking cheeseburger still gives you heartburn, but, still, it’s much better than eating shit. These things do take time, and there are cases where remedial hazing is necessary, but eventually you end up eating Filet. But it still gives you heartburn, of course.
On that particular ship, the research ship, my hazing was particularly bad. It was only my second ship, and I was still naïve enough that I was unaware of the truths that I have just laid out for you above. Before I even made it to the ship, I already had one foot hanging out the gunnels. The second mate that brought me to the ship was a guy that would never make it as a full member of the crew. He was a guy that kept eating shit, but was never going to make it, because of who he is, and because of what that Crew is. So because he wasn’t ever really a member of the Crew, my presence was seen as an attempt at “empire building” on his part. Empire building, stacking the crew with loyal ringers, sometimes works. But when it does, it is a flash in the pan. A short lived parasite squirming around in the skin of something that doesn’t actually want it there. Because, this Crew, the capital “C” crew has little to do with simple tradition and transmission. It transcends the notion of cultures, subcultures, as “organism” (even though that’s the way I’ve been describing it.) It has less to do with the mercurial social organism than it has to do with the very soul of the ship. The soul of the ship that was forged, welded, riveted, and ground way back when she was first slapped together. When she was christened and tasted cheap champagne before she ever tasted salt water. Even then, there was a soul, a spirit that inhabited the hull. Think: H.A.L. Think: Mother. They pegged me as an attempt on that mate’s part to start Empire building, and truth be told, now I know that I was brought aboard, partially, for that purpose.
Nevertheless, being buddies with the wrong person was only the beginning of my missteps and miscalculations when I joined that ship. When I left the cruise ship, it was because I knew that I had learned everything that I was going to learn on that boat. The pay was minimal ($35.00 a day) and because of USCG regulations, it would take me almost twice the sea-time to be able to get my captain’s license, and my Able-Bodied Seaman’s ticket. Christ, there were a lot of reasons for me wanting to move on to something different, I’m not going to bother you with the litany, the point being was that I was only two years in to this racket, and was still quite naïve. See, the cruise ship ran out of my hometown, and with a few exceptions, it was almost entirely crewed with folks from Rhode Island, if not my home town. It was an insular little world on that ship, and though I rubbed elbows with the Yachtsman set down in the islands, I had no experience with THAT type of sailor. And by that type, I mean guys that were seasoned in the oil patch. Which is really just a way of getting around saying what I really mean. I simply had no idea how to interact with people from below the Mason-Dixon line. I’ve said it before, but there is a serious cultural watershed thereabouts that thar line…
That was my second strike. I was guilty of being a Yankee. Then, the day after I arrived, the mate gave me the task of making Marline whippings at the shot markers on the anchor line. I had come to the ship with my roping palm and set of sail needles. The two guys I was supposed to be working with on deck were intimidated that I had an entire set of skills that they were ignorant of. I was ignorant of the fact that anybody would chose this line of work without learning the fundamentals of marlinespike seamanship. These guys didn’t even know how to tie a proper knot, and there I was making monkey’s fists and running Turk’s heads. And on top of that I was naive and all too open about the fact that I actually went to college. And even more seriously, I was much too open about the fact that I had worked as a quasi-psychologist before I ran away to sea. Fuck, that was the worst transgression of all. I by no means indicting the entirety of the south by saying this, actually, I AM indicting the populace of Panama City Florida. About 75% of the crew was from P.C. and when you said “psychology” to these guys they heard : “voodou witchcraft mind-control”. Until the day I signed off that ship I was under constant accusations of “playing mind games” with people. But their mind games were my forthrightness. The P.C. mafia mindset was diabolical and duplicitous. They’d approach you with a smile and an outstretched hand, while holding a knife ready to slit your throat if it would benefit them in the least. And because they were almost always lying and plotting, they couldn’t understand the “angle” when I was just telling the truth. Yeah… Don’t get me started.
In short, those boys wanted me off the ship BAD. I threatened them without even meaning to. And as a deckhand, my intelligence didn’t dovetail in with the Crew. Oh, and then, it ended up that Me and the Lil’ Feller became drinking buddies. The Lil’ Feller was the Captain for the first few months I was on that boat. Being his “pet” (and I was) hammered home the last nail in my coffin. And like I said before, they made those first four months on that ship hell for me. That is, when me and the Lil’ Feller weren’t AWOL and drunk by 1100. All winter and into the spring they hazed me, ostracized me. They did stupid shit like throwing my tooth brush away, or throwing my wet laundry on the filthy deck instead of putting it in the dryer. Making me polish brass all the live-long day. Climbing the mast to change out the masthead light bulb while underway. And so on. The thing was that it really didn’t rear it’s ugly head until we were on the beach drinking. That’s when you could taste the hazing like a slug of bad rye hitting the back of your throat. Unintelligent quips and swipes at my expense. And then there was the chair game. That’s what made me finally graduate into the ranks of the real crew. That’s when I knuckled under and compromised myself. When I behaved in a new and different way and was finally accepted. Back on that ship you could drink all you wanted on the dock. It was early spring, when it was getting just warm ENOUGH. And so we would all truck over to the package store after knock-off and buy our beer for the night. And our whiskey. And we’d proceed to get stinking drunk in a sad little semi-circle around the cooler. Talking without saying anything other than bitching and sniping. The thing was that there weren’t enough deck chairs for everyone. And if I was lucky enough to grab a chair when we all convened, you can be sure that as soon as I had to get up to take a leak, someone would be sitting in it when I got back. And even though, buy that time, I was comfortable enough to tell them to get the hell out of my chair, I wasn’t accepted into the Crew yet, and they’d ignore me. And when I’d grab someone else’s chair when opportunity presented itself, I’d get up and let them have it back before they asked…
So it was early spring and I’d already been made a technician, and they hired this boy to replace me. The hazing had tapered off a little when I was moved into the tech department because I wasn’t threatening anyone’s job anymore, but still, my Yankee ass was an easy target. And the boy that they hired in my original place was another dumb redneck from outside of Panama city. And they treated him worse than they treated me because they knew that he was dumb. Even though he was one of their own.
And by that point I had reached the point where I gave up. I was pissed off at the way they were treating me, and the way they were treating the boy. Bugs Bunny was the “leading seaman” and the ringleader of all the hazing. Even though I really did like him, he was being downright cruel, and I was fed up. That night when I gave up, he went out to the end of the pier to take a leak, and I took his seat. When he came back, contrary to what they all expected I didn’t move. I just sat there pulling on the communal bottle of Crown. Bugs came back and stood in front of me, waiting. And finally he rasped to “c’mon, gimmee my chair back…” and I didn’t say a thing. He asked again, all polite like, and I told him that he “stole” my chair all the time and THIS time I wasn’t going to give it back. This is where I took the off ramp from my personality. When I told him I wasn’t going to move, the torrents of resentment came tumbling out his mouth like inarticulate pieces of asphalt. He ranted about how I thought I was better than he was, and how I tried to steal his job, and this and that and whatever the hell it might have been. And where I usually do everything I can to keep the peace, I (in the lingua franca) “Bowed Up” at him. I stood up and went belly to belly (and not chest to chest, as we were drinking men) and started shouting right on back at him about how he was treating me, treating the boy. And just when it was about to come to blows, as the dockside parties often did, everybody stepped in and pinned our arms behind our backs as we continued our drunken fugue into pedestrian curses at each other.
The next day we apologized to each other, and hugged while we were still drunk from the night before. And after that, it was as if a summer thunderstorm had just swept through my life, sweeping away the oppressive humidity, leaving the crisp and invigorating cool air of a high pressure front. They had finally broken me down to the level that that Crew operated on. And they rarely fucked with me anymore.
What does all this have to do with whores? Not a whole lot, really. Except for the fact that if I hadn’t become a member of the crew, if I wasn’t TRUSTED, I never would have ended up in the spot that I did. But I haven’t typed out what all happened with the retarded crack whore just yet. Well, not at least the whole story. Just yet.
But each and every ship, its crew, has a very specific culture and personality that goes far beyond the parts of the sum of that given ship. I am quite sure that the way things work, the way we all interact, on the ship I am currently on, are the same workings and interactions that went on here when this ship was first commissioned. Which is not to say that everything is predestined and preordained aboard. Our personalities do have an effect, much like the moon on the tides; there is waxing and waning, but the ocean is always there.
And out here on the water, whenever there is a new crew member, a “FNG” (fucking new guy) it is absolutely necessary for him to undergo a hazing period in order to become a true member of the crew, a true and trusted shipmate. This hazing process is a function of the communal personality, a self-defensive mechanism in order to preserve itself intact. The hazing not only acclimates any given crew member to the new paradigm he is expected to live up to, but makes sure that any incompatible personalities aren’t allowed to infiltrate and corrupt the larger whole. For good or ill.
The form of the hazing isn’t your frat boy drink a gallon of beer through a funnel and circle jerk on a cupcake, it’s much more subtle. Subtle, but more insidious, I suppose. Insidious by nature because there is no set of tasks that a guy has to get through in order to gain acceptance. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no finish line in sight. Out here we keep it going for as long as necessary. Out here it keeps going until the FNG either proves he’s worth his salt in one way or another, or he simply gives up and jumps ship. And then there is the Mexican stand-off situations where a guy hates the crew, and the crew hates him, and neither will bend. We have that going on with our cook right now. But the thing is that even if I was to leave, even if the entire crew rotated off of this ship over the course of the next year, and he was to stay, the crew would always win. Because of that thing where the parts have little to do with the sum. The crew would eventually win, because some day he IS going to leave this ship, and up until that very day he is going to be harassed in all the little harrowing and nettling ways that we have to get away with it. In the old days, as recently as the eighties, we would simply leave him on the pier somewhere. With or without his bags. Before that? He might simply get tossed overboard in the middle of the night when nobody saw nothing.
And the hazing isn’t as concrete as the word has come to connote. It’s subtle and insidious. Nobody will talk to you. You have to perform the most demeaning and demoralizing duties. And no matter how well you carry those duties out, your supervisor will find fault and upbraid you. You constantly feel as if your job is in jeopardy, and, in my case at least, just before the Crew wins, just before I cast my hands skyward and resolve to get the fuck off that ship, something shifts. There is an imperceptible shift in attitude. From both the individual, and the crew. The level of exasperation that brings a man to the brink, is the very level of psychic stress that finally breaks an ego down. The point where you get so fucking angry where you don’t even care about your job, about your bills, about whomever is depending on you at home, is the pivot point where your very personality (ship-side at least) warps into a shape that fits the Crew, and at the same time, if you aren’t one of those that will never become a member of the crew and get runned-off the ship, it’s the same point where the Crew recognizes that you have eaten all the shit that they, that IT, has shoveled on your plate. You’ve eaten all the shit and come back for a second steaming heap of a helping with a grin on your face (because you just KNOW you are leaving…) and suddenly, instead of shit, you’ve got a cheeseburger on your plate. Sure, the freaking cheeseburger still gives you heartburn, but, still, it’s much better than eating shit. These things do take time, and there are cases where remedial hazing is necessary, but eventually you end up eating Filet. But it still gives you heartburn, of course.
On that particular ship, the research ship, my hazing was particularly bad. It was only my second ship, and I was still naïve enough that I was unaware of the truths that I have just laid out for you above. Before I even made it to the ship, I already had one foot hanging out the gunnels. The second mate that brought me to the ship was a guy that would never make it as a full member of the crew. He was a guy that kept eating shit, but was never going to make it, because of who he is, and because of what that Crew is. So because he wasn’t ever really a member of the Crew, my presence was seen as an attempt at “empire building” on his part. Empire building, stacking the crew with loyal ringers, sometimes works. But when it does, it is a flash in the pan. A short lived parasite squirming around in the skin of something that doesn’t actually want it there. Because, this Crew, the capital “C” crew has little to do with simple tradition and transmission. It transcends the notion of cultures, subcultures, as “organism” (even though that’s the way I’ve been describing it.) It has less to do with the mercurial social organism than it has to do with the very soul of the ship. The soul of the ship that was forged, welded, riveted, and ground way back when she was first slapped together. When she was christened and tasted cheap champagne before she ever tasted salt water. Even then, there was a soul, a spirit that inhabited the hull. Think: H.A.L. Think: Mother. They pegged me as an attempt on that mate’s part to start Empire building, and truth be told, now I know that I was brought aboard, partially, for that purpose.
Nevertheless, being buddies with the wrong person was only the beginning of my missteps and miscalculations when I joined that ship. When I left the cruise ship, it was because I knew that I had learned everything that I was going to learn on that boat. The pay was minimal ($35.00 a day) and because of USCG regulations, it would take me almost twice the sea-time to be able to get my captain’s license, and my Able-Bodied Seaman’s ticket. Christ, there were a lot of reasons for me wanting to move on to something different, I’m not going to bother you with the litany, the point being was that I was only two years in to this racket, and was still quite naïve. See, the cruise ship ran out of my hometown, and with a few exceptions, it was almost entirely crewed with folks from Rhode Island, if not my home town. It was an insular little world on that ship, and though I rubbed elbows with the Yachtsman set down in the islands, I had no experience with THAT type of sailor. And by that type, I mean guys that were seasoned in the oil patch. Which is really just a way of getting around saying what I really mean. I simply had no idea how to interact with people from below the Mason-Dixon line. I’ve said it before, but there is a serious cultural watershed thereabouts that thar line…
That was my second strike. I was guilty of being a Yankee. Then, the day after I arrived, the mate gave me the task of making Marline whippings at the shot markers on the anchor line. I had come to the ship with my roping palm and set of sail needles. The two guys I was supposed to be working with on deck were intimidated that I had an entire set of skills that they were ignorant of. I was ignorant of the fact that anybody would chose this line of work without learning the fundamentals of marlinespike seamanship. These guys didn’t even know how to tie a proper knot, and there I was making monkey’s fists and running Turk’s heads. And on top of that I was naive and all too open about the fact that I actually went to college. And even more seriously, I was much too open about the fact that I had worked as a quasi-psychologist before I ran away to sea. Fuck, that was the worst transgression of all. I by no means indicting the entirety of the south by saying this, actually, I AM indicting the populace of Panama City Florida. About 75% of the crew was from P.C. and when you said “psychology” to these guys they heard : “voodou witchcraft mind-control”. Until the day I signed off that ship I was under constant accusations of “playing mind games” with people. But their mind games were my forthrightness. The P.C. mafia mindset was diabolical and duplicitous. They’d approach you with a smile and an outstretched hand, while holding a knife ready to slit your throat if it would benefit them in the least. And because they were almost always lying and plotting, they couldn’t understand the “angle” when I was just telling the truth. Yeah… Don’t get me started.
In short, those boys wanted me off the ship BAD. I threatened them without even meaning to. And as a deckhand, my intelligence didn’t dovetail in with the Crew. Oh, and then, it ended up that Me and the Lil’ Feller became drinking buddies. The Lil’ Feller was the Captain for the first few months I was on that boat. Being his “pet” (and I was) hammered home the last nail in my coffin. And like I said before, they made those first four months on that ship hell for me. That is, when me and the Lil’ Feller weren’t AWOL and drunk by 1100. All winter and into the spring they hazed me, ostracized me. They did stupid shit like throwing my tooth brush away, or throwing my wet laundry on the filthy deck instead of putting it in the dryer. Making me polish brass all the live-long day. Climbing the mast to change out the masthead light bulb while underway. And so on. The thing was that it really didn’t rear it’s ugly head until we were on the beach drinking. That’s when you could taste the hazing like a slug of bad rye hitting the back of your throat. Unintelligent quips and swipes at my expense. And then there was the chair game. That’s what made me finally graduate into the ranks of the real crew. That’s when I knuckled under and compromised myself. When I behaved in a new and different way and was finally accepted. Back on that ship you could drink all you wanted on the dock. It was early spring, when it was getting just warm ENOUGH. And so we would all truck over to the package store after knock-off and buy our beer for the night. And our whiskey. And we’d proceed to get stinking drunk in a sad little semi-circle around the cooler. Talking without saying anything other than bitching and sniping. The thing was that there weren’t enough deck chairs for everyone. And if I was lucky enough to grab a chair when we all convened, you can be sure that as soon as I had to get up to take a leak, someone would be sitting in it when I got back. And even though, buy that time, I was comfortable enough to tell them to get the hell out of my chair, I wasn’t accepted into the Crew yet, and they’d ignore me. And when I’d grab someone else’s chair when opportunity presented itself, I’d get up and let them have it back before they asked…
So it was early spring and I’d already been made a technician, and they hired this boy to replace me. The hazing had tapered off a little when I was moved into the tech department because I wasn’t threatening anyone’s job anymore, but still, my Yankee ass was an easy target. And the boy that they hired in my original place was another dumb redneck from outside of Panama city. And they treated him worse than they treated me because they knew that he was dumb. Even though he was one of their own.
And by that point I had reached the point where I gave up. I was pissed off at the way they were treating me, and the way they were treating the boy. Bugs Bunny was the “leading seaman” and the ringleader of all the hazing. Even though I really did like him, he was being downright cruel, and I was fed up. That night when I gave up, he went out to the end of the pier to take a leak, and I took his seat. When he came back, contrary to what they all expected I didn’t move. I just sat there pulling on the communal bottle of Crown. Bugs came back and stood in front of me, waiting. And finally he rasped to “c’mon, gimmee my chair back…” and I didn’t say a thing. He asked again, all polite like, and I told him that he “stole” my chair all the time and THIS time I wasn’t going to give it back. This is where I took the off ramp from my personality. When I told him I wasn’t going to move, the torrents of resentment came tumbling out his mouth like inarticulate pieces of asphalt. He ranted about how I thought I was better than he was, and how I tried to steal his job, and this and that and whatever the hell it might have been. And where I usually do everything I can to keep the peace, I (in the lingua franca) “Bowed Up” at him. I stood up and went belly to belly (and not chest to chest, as we were drinking men) and started shouting right on back at him about how he was treating me, treating the boy. And just when it was about to come to blows, as the dockside parties often did, everybody stepped in and pinned our arms behind our backs as we continued our drunken fugue into pedestrian curses at each other.
The next day we apologized to each other, and hugged while we were still drunk from the night before. And after that, it was as if a summer thunderstorm had just swept through my life, sweeping away the oppressive humidity, leaving the crisp and invigorating cool air of a high pressure front. They had finally broken me down to the level that that Crew operated on. And they rarely fucked with me anymore.
What does all this have to do with whores? Not a whole lot, really. Except for the fact that if I hadn’t become a member of the crew, if I wasn’t TRUSTED, I never would have ended up in the spot that I did. But I haven’t typed out what all happened with the retarded crack whore just yet. Well, not at least the whole story. Just yet.
